OTP COMPANY MEMBERS

About our OTP Company Members

In 2021, OTP took needed steps to ensure our company structure met the expectations of our vision and guiding principles. We disbanded our formal Board / Core structure, decentralized our leadership model and now have a collective leadership team. These are the first steps we have taken to begin dismantling the white supremacist structures built into OTP and American Theatre's history.

Each company member is committed to to the success of the company as a whole while focusing on their personal involvement in different facets of the OTP Community. As audience members, creators, collaborators and trusted voices in our world, they bring to life many of the ideas that grace our stage. Company members keep OTP moving with monthly meetings and asks to be at as many OTP events as possible during the series run. Most important is the voice of each Company Member, they will get a say in what we produce, how we engage our community and more.

Dev Luthra

Actor | Teaching Artist | Playwright

Dev Luthra trained at East 15 Acting School, London, England and at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA. He joined OTP in 2023. Work with the company includesthe Open Voice Series with Weighting the Wait (devised piece in development with the LDBrown Peace Institute), My Body My Choice (National performance protest with Arena Theatre), Boston Theatre Marathon. Recent acting credits include Woodhouse, Weston/Emma at Actors Shakespeare Project; Burbage, Jaggard/Book of Will at Hub Theatre of Boston; Sorin/Seagull and Attorney/The Gaaga at Arlekin Players (Norton Award, Best Play); Iago/Othello at DreamRole Players (EPC production); Antigonus, Old Shepherd, Bottom/The Winter’s Tale and Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bay Colony Shakespeare Company, Dance Teacher Pat/Dance Nation, Father/Brilliant Adventuresand Azdak/Caucasian Chalk Circle (Apollinaire Theatre Company), Northumberland/Henry IV, parts 1 & 2 (Actors Shakespeare Project), M. le Comte/N. Bonaparte (Pilgrim Theatre), Dev teaches at Wheelock Family Theatre and Company One. His courses focus on Shakespeare, devised theatre, acting, and playwrighting. He also offers residencies at schools throughout the area. He has taught acting, movement, dramatic literature and poetry at Boston College and Emerson College and at Boston University’s Prison Education Program. Dev served as the Artistic Director of And Still We Rise Productions, a theatre company committed to the advocacy of the rights of people impacted by the prison system. Macbeth’s Children, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, co-written with Michael Bettencourt, won an AATE New Play award. His play Secret Asian Man is a piece focusing on the experience of being raised in two cultures. Other produced works include Peeling the Onion (AAPC)and Weighting the Wait(OTP). Of Anglo-Indian parentage, he has lived and worked in the Northeast since 1978.

Christina R. Chan

PLAYWRIGHT | ACTOR

BIO COMING SOON

LUCAS MILLIKEN

Actor | Teaching Artist | Playwright

BIO COMING SOON

Zahra A. Belyea, M.Ed., M.A.

Storyteller | Educator |Playwright |
Movement Performer

Zahra A. Belyea holds a B.A. in English from Boston University, an M.Ed. in Secondary Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College, and an M.A. in Theatre Education from Emerson College. During her many years as an educator, she has had the privilege of working with many students as she taught and tutored in both writing and literature on the collegiate, secondary, and middle school levels, acted as a Writing Consultant/Tutor at Fisher College, the University of New Hampshire (UNH), and Wheelock College, and held the position of Academic Support Specialist for Graduate Students at Wheelock College. Additionally, she was the former coordinator of a writing studio at a university in Florida. As a teaching artist, movement performer, and playwright, she has had the privilege of working, performing, or writing with or for numerous venues, artists, art institutions, and theatre companies such as the Berklee Performance Center, the Rhode Island Convention Center, Open Theatre Project, We Create! Celebrating Women in the Arts Festival, Company One Theatre, Central Square Theater, ArtsEmerson, The Billie Holiday Theatre, Fort Point Theatre Channel, On With Living and Learning (OWLL), and And Still We Rise Productions, for which she was a former Assistant Director.

Zahra first met Shakespeare as a teenager, Hamlet becoming her favorite play. Her relationship with that text has shifted and changed over the years, growing in ways deep and wide. Since losing her own father in 2015, she better understands Hamlet’s lens of grief, looking at a world continuing to spin without his father on it. She is grateful to her sisters, her parents, and extended family and friends who have walked with her along this journey, so that unlike Hamlet, she has learned the gift of love her father left behind and the reality that she lives in community with many people who have suffered loss, learning to see each other and remind one other that we are not alone and we don’t have to be alone…

As she learns to embrace Faith over Fear, she is leaning closer to God, who continues to help her navigate through a life that has not always been what she has wanted or expected, but which has been teaching her that as long as she stays open to opportunities as they present themselves, remains compassionate to the people around her, and stays humble, she doesn’t need to know where the road ends.

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Howard Zilber

Playwright

When I was a boy I was fascinated by politics and wanted to grow up and solve the problems of poverty, discrimination, war, and injustice through politics. In my childish naiveté I sometimes feared those problems would be solved before I grew up. But in my teenage years I learned all my talents and interests are all really artistic and intellectual. I formed a vague intention of being a writer. And since I so enjoyed fiction, I assumed that is what I’d be writing.

But whenever I wrote a story it was always unsatisfyingly unoriginal. I got a couple of degrees in philosophy, and even taught it a bit, while thinking of ideas I would develop someday. Still I yearned to be a writer.

I happened to read a book by Walter Kerr that extolled the mythic power of theatre. I was hooked. Since that time, along with some shorter pieces, I have written approximately eighteen plays and musicals. They vary enormously in content and tone from a through-sung musical based on the Odyssey to a dark play about a murder a friend witnessed, from a delightful retelling of The Pied Piper to a biting comedy about a couple who contrive a dinner party with guests calculated to clash.

Several of these works have been performed in the area by Theater-in-Process, Centastage, the Newburyport Firehouse Center for the Arts, and of course, the Open Theatre Project, which I am proud to call may artistic home. It is for OTP that I am currently developing a play called My Season of Mortality. Since I am thinking about mortality, I’ve begun to write all the things I was planning to write “someday”, such as philosophy and commentary on Jewish sacred texts.

I hope that reconnecting with my past doesn’t mean I will soon be entering politics!